


Evangeliary

by Vana



Series: Gathering Seashells on the Event Horizon: A Stavos Collection [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: M/M, freeform randomness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 02:00:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five senses, seven gods, fate and surrender.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evangeliary

**Author's Note:**

> Written for stannisficartweek, based loosely on the prompt "Stannis/Davos: first time."

 

The room went black, caving in, and Stannis was losing himself — spiraling down, whirling into a world in which nothing was sure and he was sure of nothing. He seemed to be falling into fire, or breathing through water. His breathing was labored and his skin burned with a delicious and searing heat. When he could see again, there was a candlelight, a scattering of hewn-rock walls, a worn tapestry.  

It was the past, or an unmapped part of the present, and he was not alone. The presence of others surrounded him: he heard their breath in every stone.

 

_The Father’s face is stern and strong_

Working hands caught roughly on his skin, assaying every inch of him. Stannis arrested one in its path down his arm and lifted it to his face, taking the measure of it with his eyes as surely as it had taken the measure of him with fingers. The palm was lined deeply, the fissures holding cracked skin and the fates of all the ages of man. The fingernails, rough and uneven, had caught on his own skin, relieving an itch he hadn’t felt there until a ragged nail found it. The skin was tanned and mottled by years in the sun and in the sea. This hand was beautiful in its brownness and glorious in its leather, with the outline of the strong bones visible even in the flickering light; but it was pulled away even as Stannis looked, returning impatiently to his body, where a sigh and the release of a measure of tension revealed its purpose. He felt himself judged — _numbered, numbered, weighed, divided —_ and, for the first time, he was not found wanting. The hardened hands in all their experience had come to this: to find truly who Stannis was, to find out what he had to give — and what he would be given back.

 

 _The Mother gives the gift of life_  

This hymn was not made of sound, but of scent. Stannis hadn’t let himself think of her in so long. He was so tired of the ache of unshed tears, a pounding in his temples that wouldn’t abate, even when as a teenager he had gone silently to her wardrobe and held her green dress to his face — closing his eyes in the warp and weft of it, breathing in the faint scent of her that still clung to it two years after she had been taken by the sea. It was not quite perfume — not her woodsy spray that she had let him play with when he was three until he spilled half of it on the floor. Even then she had not scolded, only laughed. Now Stannis could smell it again, the safety enveloping him like the forest and her arms, and he breathed in and in and in and he wept in relief. It was not even her breath he could sense on her dress and in the room. It was something more visceral, the scent of her skin and her essence, something he had not known he’d recognize although it was the first thing he had ever smelt, when he was laid on her breast at one hour old. They said he didn’t squall like the others, but looked up with solemn blue eyes at her for a moment, seeking trust and security. And when he had found it, he closed his eyes and slept. 

 

_The Warrior stands before the foe_

A clash of metal on metal disturbed the silence outside — just an echo really, a shadow of a sound. There were voices, or was it one voice? It was music, a minor chord, a protection spell sung under the high ceiling a drumbeat that pulsed through him faster and faster until he had no choice but to move with it. A harmony sheared through the screams and a melody bled from the cries. Chaos was in the song, crashing water and the rush of waves, and the sounds of night, and the breath over everything that warmed and soothed even as something wild and writhing raged outside. Still he held on, and still, and still. The cry of battle became a whisper — Stannis’ own name murmured gently into his ear — then curled out again to a resounding victory. In the quiet that followed, he knew he was saved.

 

_The Crone is very wise and old_

Stannis saw himself as a spider would, hovering just below the soot-blackened ceiling, or a dust mote in the archway of the window that looked out onto a rough sea. His vision widened to take in the room, the hallways, the vast stronghold, the tower jutting out into the water like a lighthouse he had seen once on the coast. That country was far away now, and he could hardly remember it as new lands spread out in front of him: icy north, fertile south, softly shadowed east and _here_. Here was West, here was destiny and home, family known and unknown. Stannis saw his own flushed face and searching eyes; he saw them both, together and unfixed in the vast spaces of time, hanging onto their fate with a new thread of silk spun from a ceiling. He smiled from the mouth of the great-grandparent of the world and knew this was larger than himself, larger than humanity, larger than the universes. Yet it was more vital than the smallest atom shimmering at the center of the drop of sweat that trailed down his own forehead, threatened at his eyebrow, and was kissed away.

 

_The Smith, he labors day and night_

He had tasted this skin before, on those oppressive nights when the heat beat down on the parched land, and the fields suffered from thirst just as the two of them suffered from the wanting they couldn’t yet define. Salt and sweat from a day on the docks had sharpened on his tongue as he tried to hold it there for long minutes. The first kiss was another revelation, a sting of the sea in it amid the grateful sweetness, the relief of standing in the river and no longer fighting it. Every taste was new, yet as familiar as childhood, as intoxicating as liquor and the first fresh berries of the spring, gathered for the last time when he was barely six years old. Now he took all the time he wanted for his tongue and lips to find their way around the trembling skin. He drank in the tastes and floated on them as on saltwater; he tried to draw more and more of them out and into his mouth, there to savor and drown in. 

 

_The Maiden dances through the sky_

In the final surrender, there was a sense of taking the first step — _darest thou now, O Soul, walk out with me toward the Unknown Region where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow —_ where none could exist but the two of them, surrounded and enfolded in their sighs, in the rising tide, in the building heat and flowing fire between them. Like lava or the trail of a meteor, he imagined distractedly, as a kind of adrenaline confused his thoughts and his synapses jumped with his muscles from one sensation to the next. The pauses between these were shorter and shorter until they were not there at all, and Stannis was aflame with joy, his body newly annealed, his skin tingling with every pounding heartbeat. He held on tight and then tighter, clinging to his lover with every bit of himself but looking down over the edge in a blissful anticipation.

 

_The Stranger’s—_

The song broke off. This silence was the empty ghost of sound after the switch is thrown on a radio, and Stannis was pulled abruptly back; he didn’t know from where or to where — that world closed down as suddenly as the shutter on an old camera. The stone walls were gone, replaced once more with the whiteness of his own room; the candle was his light fixture, which shifted out of focus as his head swam with the onset of violent climax. There was a vague shadow where the Stranger had been, a foreshadowing of that presence that meant uncertainty and surrender and entrusting his very self to another. He was sure of nothing, not even the bed underneath him which seemed to float and weave on waves he could no longer be certain he felt, except the strong arms holding him, anchoring him in the swirling darkness. When he fell, he still felt their seven shadows around them even as he shuddered them out of existence. And together they rose, fell, expanded, dissolved — outside the walls, outside the world, out with the stars and the light and the mystery.

 

\---

 

The next morning, Davos was up early in the kitchen, smiling and feeling embarrassed about it — ridiculous for that hour in the morning, and for how tritely cheerful he was. Stannis slid silently into a chair at the table, and Davos set a cup of tea in front of him. He watched Stannis lift it to his lips, then wary of appearing to be staring, he turned back to the sink. When the tea was half gone, Stannis said something very un-Stannis-like.

“What were you thinking about?”

Davos was taken aback. “When?” he managed. 

“Last night.”

“Um. I was ... not doing much thinking, I’m afraid.” Davos grinned but Stannis looked surpassingly serious. “Why? What were _you_ thinking?”

The blue eyes fixed on his own. “It was almost ... there was a vision.” His voice faltered, and recovered. He looked down into his teacup, concentrating. “There were seven ... something. The smith, the maiden ...”

“The _maiden_?”

“They were ... avatars, maybe. Of something. I think maybe they were gods. Oh, I don’t know. It was all an illusion, but very vivid. Davos, you hadn’t lit a candle, had you?”

“No. Did you see one?”

“I saw fire. And I saw _them_ — the Seven. They were in the light, flickering in and out of it. They were in the air of the place.”

“Was I there?” Davos almost didn’t want to hear the answer: what if he wasn’t?

“They were with us. You were all around ... around me. You were every part of them and every part of me, or they were both of us. But yes,” Stannis reached out and took Davos’ hand. “You were there. As _there_ as you really are.”

Davos smiled, weakly. He could ask for worse than for Stannis to have had some kind of a religious experience the first time they made love to each other. “What if I’d told you I’d been thinking of the footie? The Seagulls could’ve had that last goal ...”

Stannis wrinkled his brow, but there was no actual tension in it. He pulled Davos to him and laid his lips on Davos’ cheekbone, then his mouth. “Hush about the footie,” he said. 

Hours later, they were back in bed, their bodies just beginning to understand each other’s rhythms and marveling at them. Davos was trying to get the pace of his heartbeat back down and to still his own shaking, and Stannis was very near to him, the tiny veins of his eyelids quivering as he sunk into a dream, holding Davos close. He was saying or humming something Davos couldn’t place, a tune or a poem. Concentrating, Davos was able to piece some of it together. It sounded comforting and peaceful, and somehow deep with generations of stories.

“… who made us all are listening if you should call … just close your eyes, you shall not fall ...” Stannis murmured just before he slept, whispering on their shared breath.  

**Author's Note:**

> Note: please see [ http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/The_Song_of_the_Seven](http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/The_Song_of_the_Seven), [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mene,+mene,+tekel,+upharsin](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mene,+mene,+tekel,+upharsin%20), and <http://www.bartleby.com/142/200.html>.
> 
> An Evangeliary is a book out of which certain sections of the Christian Gospel are read.
> 
> All my thanks to Hedge_witch for reading this for me!


End file.
